Bit-tech and Asus Summer Overclocking Summit

Round 2 - 3DMark11

With round one proving to be quite heated, and all teams having got to grips with their motherboards, we then stopped for pizza and plenty of chatting. This was then followed by a talk from Andrew Wu, an Asus Republic of Gamers product manager, who talked about the future of ROG and also answered questions from the audience about Asus' past and present ROG motherboard line-up.


It was soon back to business with the benchmarking, though, and this time the test involved overclocking the GeForce GTX 560 Ti 1GB graphics cards using Asus' SmartDoctor software. The target for most teams was a 1GHz core clock, which many managed after ten minutes or so of tweaking. The first 3DMark11 scores started rolling in soon after that, although some teams still felt they could get a little more out of their hardware.

After various overclocking-induced 3DMark crashes, and lots of cursing and swearing, the final whistle heralded some surprising results. Of particular note, the guys in team six, who came last in the previous round, rocketed to first place in this session. This meant that team one, which came first in the previous round, just clinched first place overall, despite coming fourth in the 3DMark11 marathon.


Although many of the teams' members had limited P67 overclocking experience, this didn't seem to hinder anyone, and the event was so much fun that we'll be holding it twice a year, so stay tuned for information on how to enter the next one. Thanks to Asus for sponsoring the event and providing the prizes, as well as Thermaltake and Adata for supplying the additional hardware and peripherals for the overclocking systems.